menloshark

I don't know what they were thinking with this one. Imagine this: you're in a little hellhole that tries to force you to work 7 days a week. It's already toxic and backstabbing is everywhere. You have to convince yourself that the work is worthwhile.

Then all of a sudden, the leadership says (out loud) that they're going to track your keystrokes to figure out how to automate your job, then fire you. Also, they're forcing 10% of the company to leave their current position (which they might be highly specialized in, PhDs even) to do data labeling grunt work so they can accomplish this. They're also laying off another 10% of the company, go figure.

First off, why would you (the hypothetical employee) want to do any good work for these people? It creates an outright antagonistic relationship between the company and its employees. The fact that they had the audacity to do all of this planning at a Hawaii offsite just rubs salt in the wound to be honest. It's like they read some McKinsey bullshit about AI and lost their fucking mind.

> A company like Meta could shed 60% and if done with precision and not suffer greatly.

It's entirely self inflicted. A bunch of the headcount is thrown at exploratory initiatives which aren't necessary for keeping the lights on. The leadership has done an incredibly bad job at diversification (compared to Google for example). If the Metaverse was successful and revenue generating, the "true" headcount of non-bullshit jobs would be larger for example.

Also the company is publicly traded, Twitter is a private company. The stock is priced at a current forward multiple which expects future growth. If the ads growth story stops happening (and they're not diversifying in other lanes, which it seems like they're incapable of doing), the stock is going to take a hit. "Keeping the lights on" is not going to pan out well in this case.

Also if you fire 60%, how do you (the hypothetical CEO) identify who to fire if every manager at every level of the chain is incentivized to lie to you and overstate the significance of what they're doing? There is no precision here.

One thing we use it for is for forking tools internally because of politics.

Oh no, they totally do, everyone makes fun of them.

It's bizarre because there's this culture of really brazen leadership, but everyone is constantly criticizing them and laugh emoji reacting to their posts. But I think it's quieted down a bit before half year perf cycle

look, he's bad, don't work for him, just burn this into your memory, it's not that complicated

> I've worked in Big Tech and I know for sure the team you're on makes a big difference, regardless of the CEO.

Yeah this is true, but also if the company wants to make everyone suffer, they absolutely can. When companies have a bad reputation, people should believe it

If you like him so much, you should go work for him. Then call us back

> And of course this is not unique to Zuck/Meta. We don't hear much from people working for Musk either.

Because they're being forced to works nights and weekends and don't have time

> They're very very happy to spill beans and talk about the current environment on Blind which is a lot less hostile.

This is funny, Blind is even more negative on the general company sentiment than this place. People are saying the current morale right now is the worst it's ever been.

This is really common at his company btw, this shit trickles down from leadership.

For example, a director wrote a post internally solely with AI, didn't review it at all, directly plagiarized a bunch of stuff that other people wrote, and left a bunch of typos like [[link]]. It was just a post about why we need to use more AI or some bullshit like that.

I had a direct manager who did shit way worse than this on a regular basis. Once people just learn to expect constant psycho head games and shit testing 24/7, the lost good will is not recoverable.

I think the weird thing with meta is that this type of weird bullshit is a company-wide phenomenon. Like them turning around and forcing 8k people to do data labeling work. A lot of the victims were super late in their careers and highly specialized. And the same guy who forced this thing on everyone (the CTO) has now turned around and publicly criticized MZ for messing up morale.

Funnily enough, my manager did a lot of the same thing, maliciously creating a problem and then trying to blame it on someone else. A lot of these little games trickle down. As a company, they tend to select for people like Elizabeth Holmes

From the inside, there's a crazy amount of attrition right now. The way they handled this layoff freaked a bunch of people out. They didn't acknowledge it for one month and every week we were wondering if it was going to happen.

It was a 10% cut but it hit SWE pretty hard, looking at partner teams it was around 15-20%. Another 10% were "drafted" to this bullshit data labeling org.

On partner teams, attrition seems to be 10-20% over the last couple months (in addition to prior layoff numbers), maybe higher. Will probably go up again after the next vest. Right now it seems like internal comms has shifted where they're begging people to not leave and saying how they will try to improve things.

There have been several reorgs recently. Doesn't seem like anyone knows what the fuck is happening. Teams are significantly smaller than what they were before and it seems like consolidation should be happening, but leadership is in this weird state of paralysis where they're just leaving shit in the current half-reorged state and not doing anything.

So tl;dr, right now it's the biggest dumpster fire I've ever seen in my life. Feels like I'm watching the Titanic sink

> because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy

right now they're freaking out over attrition and making a bunch of posts internally about how they'll "do better"

> median employee tenure

it's less than two years, probably well below average. maybe it was more previously

> or some other non FAANG big tech corp.

The acronym is outdated. I don't really see a difference between FAANG or Nvidia/Stripe/Uber/etc in terms of brand recognition.

And also it depends on where you land org-wise. What you actually are working on is more important than the brand name

> was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling

I think the main proponent was Bosworth, not Wang

The total comp is a lie because the average tenure is <2 years, statistically speaking you won't get the full 4yr initial grant by the time you leave.

Just one suggestion: don't stop interviewing and be very observant of whatever team you land in, be ready to jump ship if there are too many red flags. Also don't trust any of the managers. Don't take anything people say at face value. Be very discerning in team matching, where you land determines everything.

You might be thinking "oh if I just work 7 days a week, I'll be safe". That's not true, it's all about where you land.

> or do you actually have to hunt for your own projects, like you might in some consulting firms?

This is how the company works on a fundamental level.

On healthy teams, having something assigned to you (for levels under staff/6) is normal. On unhealthy teams, you're just a sitting duck and it's better to find your own work. Or else you'll be forced to work on bullshit projects with no upside.

Side note: the "they" who does the assigning is not a manager, it's another IC. The ones that go out and find their own work. That could be at any level technically, but usually staff+ because they form little political mafias.

Maybe if you joined 10 years ago lmao

The latter. I've seen so much unethical shit here, I'd love to give more detail but I'd probably dox myself

Here's how things play out: Zuck gets some idea, he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men who say "yes, this will definitely change the world", then it turns into this optics game of kissing the ring. You ask yourself "how could they blow 80B on the Metaverse like that", this is how.

DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team matching). There's a reason why the average tenure is <2 years.

It's a toxic and fear based culture. You join, the people around you are already thinking how to scapegoat you. People gatekeep actual work and save it for political favorites and everyone else on the outside is stuck cooking up bullshit projects. If you do manage to find work on your own, people will immediately start scheming to steal it